Hii Friends, last night I was fighting with a Laptop that needed an OS to boot with. But as soon as I started, problems started to appear. Tried booting with the CD, did'nt help.

Then I Had two options left, either to go ahead using LAN Boot or boot it using a Pendrive. But how can you boot something using PXE Boot when you don't have a LAN...;). So I choose to go ahead with the Pendrive.

Here I share what I did to make a Bootable pendrive....Please make sure that you are doing this process on Windows Vista and later versions of Windows. This is not applicable to Windows XP.

• I got a pendrive (2GB) as I was going to install Windows Server 2008. You need a pendrive that can easily accomodate the size of the Windows you plan to install.
• Now Ever since Microsoft came out with Windows Vista and others version of Windows, they have modified the Boot Process and how the Boot configuration settings are managed by the Windows. (Although I am not going to discuss about it here)
• So now I am going to do some magic stuff using the Command Prompt. So lets get started by Pressing Ctrl+R to open the Run window. Type cmd and Press Enter to open the Command Prompt.

• We will use a bunch of commands to do the stuff. So let's get started with the Command that will let us to have a look at our Windows Disk partitions. Type "DISKPART" and press Enter.
• Now you need to select the Pendrive Disk. Type "LIST DISK" to see the list of Disk Drives. As In my case I have a pendrive of size 2GB (~2000 MB), you can see in the screenshot below I have a Disk 2 of 1919 MB.

• To select the Pendrive Disk type "Select Disk 2" since it is Disk 2.
• Now Type "Clean" which will Clean any Partition or Volume Formatting related with our Pendrive.
• After cleaning we will now create a primary partition on the Disk. To Do it Type "Create Partition Primary" and press Enter.
• Type "Select Partition 1" that was just created.
• Next we mark the Partition to be Active. For this Type "Active" and press Enter.
• Now Type "FORMAT FS = NTFS" to format the Drive using NTFS file system. This will take a while depending on the Size of Pendrive.
• Now we need to mount and assign a Drive letter to the Drive. Type "Assign" and Enter and you are done.
• Now Type "Exit" and you have left the Disk Part.
• Now get the Drive Letter of the CD Drive that has mounted Windows Setup files. In my case, I have mounted a Windows Server 2008 ISO in drive K. So now I type "K: CD BOOT" and press Enter. (As already said Boot directory is present in Windows Vista and later not XP.)
• Now move into the Boot directory of CD Drive that has the ISO mounted using "cd BOOT"
• Now we need to write some Boot configuration to the Pendrive to make it a bootable one using our next command. Type "bootsect /nt60 L:" to update the Master Boot Records. Make sure that you select your Pendrive Drive Letter instead of L: in your case.
• The next step left is to simply copy all the Windows Setup files from the CD Drive to the Pendrive.
• Now make sure that your BIOS settings give preference to the USB HDD Boot option and then try boot you computer. Now you find that you have a bootable pendrive.

So you saw how to create bootable pendrive. Hopefully you enjoyed reading the Article.